Factmata

Privacy Policy

Factmata, including its website and the Factmata browser extension (“the Service”) is operated by Factmata Limited, Companies House #10574955 (“The Operator”). It is our policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our products and services. If you have questions about deleting or correcting your personal data, please contact us.

Basic Principles

The Operator cares deeply about your privacy. Not only because we think you'll be mad at us if we don't, but because it's right. What you do is nobody else's business, unless you want them to know so that they can help you with something. We follow these principles:

We don't ask you for personal information unless we need it to improve the user experience.

We don't share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law [1], protect our rights, or develop our products.

We aim to make it as simple as possible to control what information other users and the public can see about you.

[1] Sadly, the applicable law in most countries doesn't respect privacy anywhere near as much as they ought to. We'll try our utmost to do the right thing, but since governments have guns, we can't make any promises.

What information we collect

User information

We keep a fairly limited amount of information in the user table: username, name email and last login date. We have optional fields for a location and any other data obtained via the Twitter oAuth function (governed by [this privacy policy]). The only requirement for signing up to our website is a working email address. Users younger than 18 should always check with their parents or guardians before entering information on any website, mobile or tablet-based application, and discuss with their parents or guardians the online sharing of personal information.

Access to this information is restricted to system administrators. For support purposes, the Factmata staff has limited access to user data (email, username, active status, number of claims checked, number of websites fact checked, number of claims shared). The Operator doesn’t share user information with advertisers, affiliates or partners nor monetise its user traffic in any way. In each case, the Operator collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor's interaction with the Service. Users can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain Service-related activities.

Device information

We may collect device-specific information, such as your hardware model, operating system version, unique device identifiers, browser type, browser language, referral URL, or mobile network information especially via the user of third party analytics tools such as Google Analytics.

Log information

When you use the Service, our server logs may collect certain information about your activities, including details of content you viewed, the date and time of each request, and IP addresses.

Usage data

In order to provide the best user experience, we collect data about your interactions with the Service, for example websites fact checked, claims annotated, claims discussed, claims fact-checked, claims shared, activity patterns, etc.

Local Storage

We may collect and store information (including personal information) locally on your device using mechanisms such as browser web storage (including HTML5) and application data caches.

Cookies

Factmata may place a number of cookie files on your web browser. By using the service you consent to the use of cookies.

Cookies are small pieces of text sent to your web browser by a website you visit. A cookie file is stored in your web browser and allows our service to recognize you. Cookies allow us to remember if you’re logged in and if you were annotating privately, in a group, or publicly.

If you’d like to delete cookies or instruct your web browser to delete or refuse cookies, please visit the help pages of your web browser. Please note, however, that if you delete cookies or refuse to accept them, you might not be able to use all of the features we offer, you may not be able to store your preferences, and some of our pages might not display properly.

How we use the information

We use the information we collect from our users to maintain, protect and improve our services, and to develop new ones. We use information collected from cookies and other technologies to improve your user experience and the overall quality of our services.

Handling user data

We don't save any passwords, we only save a temporary access token (OAuth Token) passed in by Google or Twitter. No Operator staff member has access to user passwords. Factmata staff has access to user emails only for support purposes.

User IP address, browser info, device info and so on will be collected by 3rd party analytics services according to their policy. This de-identified information is used for internal metrics and operational support, but we do not track your individual activity on the Factmata extension or the API. On third parties:

The Operator doesn’t share user information with advertisers, affiliates or partners nor monetize its customer traffic in any way.

Access to annotation data

There are a few ways in which a user’s annotations are available to other users:

Information about user annotations shared in public channels like Twitter and potentially available on our feed are visible to every user of the Service

User annotations will be directly visible when a user visits a website that another user has annotated.

The same applies to our API users: authenticated users can only retrieve annotations for which they have the right permissions. Unauthenticated users can only retrieve public annotations.

With respect to the Operator’s staff, a small number of engineering staff have database access that lets them see any annotation or profile data in your account, in order to operate the service and address problems with the system. Staff is not allowed to re-disclose private user information.

Chrome extension permissions

The Factmata extension for Chrome will ask users to grant certain permissions at the time of installation via a notification from the Chrome browser. The extension needs them in order to work with the user’s browser and the websites the user visits.

Chrome overstates what Factmata needs permission to do — we don’t use your camera, for example. We ask for these permissions because the extension needs them in order to work with your browser and the websites you visit. However, our intention is only to access the minimum permissions we need to in order to do these things on your behalf, and nothing more. We don’t monitor, track or collect any of your personal data beyond what is necessary for creating, saving and reading your annotations. Factmata does not generate revenue from advertising or from selling metrics to third parties.

Read and change all your data on all websites you visit: we ask this so that we can inject the annotator code into the page and interact with the text on it, add and read annotations. We don’t read or modify any other data.

Access your browsing activity: we need this to maintain the state of the Factmata extension on windows or tabs you have open. We also need this is to be able to tell you (via the extension badge) when a page you visit has been annotated. We don’t keep track of what you do in the browser.

Communicate with cooperating websites: this permission is used to communicate with the Factmata website to know, for example, if you have the extension installed or not.

We don’t use permissions to change your settings to force the browser to accept cookies and run JavaScript, plugins, geolocation, microphone, camera etc. The Service runs under the assumption cookies and JS is enabled.

Your privacy is very important for us and we’re trying our best to ask you for as little information as we can. If you have any questions or would like some more details, please write to info@factmata.com and we’ll help you out!

Contact with users

We send account registration, activation and password reset notifications via email. We also send event notifications such as about replies to annotations via email, with the option to opt-out.

If you are a registered user of our website and have supplied your email address, we may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what's going on with the Service. In the future we may also send information about important service updates or substantial changes in Privacy Policy or our Terms of Service.

Support

When you contact us, we may keep a record of your communication to help solve any issues you might be facing. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish a de-personalised, anonymised version of it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users.

Location

We may process personal information on our servers in any country in the world, and therefore cannot guarantee that your information will be processed or stored on a server located in the country where you live.
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When we share the information

We do not share potentially personally-identifying or personally-identifying information with outside parties unless one of the following circumstances apply.

With your consent

We will share personal information when we have your consent to do so. This will always be done on an opt-in, rather than an opt-out, basis. In other words, we will not assume that we have your consent.

With our service providers

We disclose such information only to those of our employees, contractors, and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on our behalf or to provide services available at our websites, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others.

Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country. By using our websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. We will not rent or sell such information to anyone. We do not share user information with advertisers, affiliates or partners. We do not monetize our user traffic in any way.

For legal reasons

We will share personal information with outside parties outside if we:

are required to do so by law

believe in good faith that access, use, preservation or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Factmata, third parties or the public at large

In a depersonalised, aggregated way

We may share statistics about the behavior of visitors to our websites. We may display this aggregated information publicly or provide it to others.
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Accessing and updating your personal information

Whenever you use our services, we aim to provide you with access to your personal information. If that information is wrong, we strive to give you ways to update it quickly or to delete it — unless we have to keep that information for legitimate business or legal purposes.

Transparency and choice

People have different privacy concerns. Our goal is to be clear about what information we collect, so that you can make meaningful choices about how it is used.

Information security

We take all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access to, use of, alteration of, or destruction of personal information.

Terms of service

Use of the Service is subject to our Terms of Service. This Privacy Policy should be read in conjunction with them. In the event of a conflict or disagreement between this Privacy Policy and the Terms of Service, the Terms of Service shall prevail.

Continuation

If the Operator is involved in a merger, acquisition or asset sale, we will continue to ensure the confidentiality of any personal information and give affected users notice before personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

Consent

By using Factmata and this website, you consent to this Privacy Policy.

Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, we may change our Privacy Policy from time to time, and in our sole discretion.

We will post any privacy policy changes on this page, and/or update the Privacy Policy modification date below, and encourage you to check it for any changes to our Privacy Policy. If the changes are significant, we will aim to provide a more prominent notice — email notifications, for example.

Your continued use of the Service after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change. We will also keep prior versions of this Privacy Policy in an archive for your review.